For over four decades Britain has been a reluctant member of the European Union. Now Prime Minister David Cameron is promising to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU and then allow a referendum so the British people can decide whether Britain should stay in the EU.

Why is it that Britain and the British people have never totally embraced the idea of the European Union? Can Cameron negotiate a new deal for Britain within the framework of the EU and will it be possible for Britain to leave the EU if the British people vote 'no' in the referendum? Rear Vision tells the story of Britain’s relationship with the European Union.

Transcript

David Cameron [archival]: This morning I want to talk about the future of Europe. The next Conservative manifesto in 2015 will ask for a mandate from the British people for a Conservative government to negotiate a new settlement with our European partners in the next parliament. It will be a relationship with the single market at its heart. And when we have negotiated that new settlement we will give the British people a referendum with a very simple 'in or out' choice.

Annabelle Quince: David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, speaking at a press conference earlier this year.

David Cameron supports Britain staying in the European Union. His decision to give the British people a choice about whether or not to stay in reflects a growing dissatisfaction by many people in Britain with the EU and the powers that are now held in Brussels.

Hello, I'm Annabelle Quince and this is Rear Vision on RN and via the web. Today we trace the relationship between Britain and the European Union.

In the years following the end of World War II, the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the European Union, was set up by six founding members; France, West Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Italy. Britain however decided not to join.

Catherine Hoskyns is professor emeritus at Coventry University in gender studies and European politics.

Catherine Hoskyns: There was a huge need to create a structure which would allow economic development and would contain Germany, but in a way that would allow Germany to rebuild. So this very imaginative idea of pooling the coal and steel industries, which were both the base for economic recovery and the base for armaments or for military revival, to pool them under a common authority which would be a European authority. That was the kind of imaginative idea, but it didn't envisage at that time political union, although that was always a possibility.

Annabelle Quince: Christopher Booker, columnist with the Sunday Telegraph and author of The Great Deception: Can the European Union Survive? argues that the Coal and Steel Community had a more political agenda right from the start.

Christopher Booker: So what the intention was was to set up a body that would be above the nation states that would be able to tell the nation states what to do. And initially Monsieur Jean Monnett, this Frenchman, was the first president of the European Coal and Steel Community, when he appeared in front of the politicians who were gathered to run this thing, his first remarks were, 'Gentlemen, you are the government of Europe.' Now, looking back this looks utterly crazy, it might have looked crazy at the time, because they weren't the government of Europe, all they were was a body set up to coordinate and to direct the running of coal and steel industries in just six countries.

But Monnet knew, and the intention always was, as we can see now from documents, some of which have only come to light in recent years, that this was intended to be the first step, this was the embryo, this was the seed of something far, far bigger and more ambitious. So the first step was the Coal and Steel Community, then six years later they signed a thing called the Treaty of Rome, and this time it was to go much wider than just coal and steel, it was to be a common market, a trading entity, a customs union, which would keep out goods from the outside world. It was very protectionist. The point was that it was to be run by a set of institutions in Brussels which would have power over the countries making it up, still only six.

But the intention was just to build from there. They'd created the institutions of what is in essence a government, a supranational government, as it's called. And the idea has always been, right from the start, progressively to take away the powers of nation states, of countries to run themselves, and to hand over the supreme power to the new political construction centred in Brussels.

Catherine Hoskyns: There was a political agenda in the sense that I think those people, and they were mainly French in the French planning department, those people recognised that what had been done after the First World War where Germany had been punished and reprisals which didn't allow German economic revival had been very counter-productive, created a nationalism in Germany and a great hostility which caused the Second World War. So they had a clear idea, we had to do something different. So you had to create a framework where Germany could revive but in a non-hostile way, in a way that the other countries could control. So there was a political agenda in that sense.

Annabelle Quince: And why did Britain not join with that original European Coal and Steel Community back in the early 1950s?

Catherine Hoskyns: Well, Britain, if you imagine, after the war was regarded as the victorious power and had not been occupied and was looking forward to a regeneration. But Britain in those days thought of herself as a worldwide power, not a European power. So the Commonwealth was still very strong, and Britain had that idea of not tying herself to Europe but having a much broader scope. But also…I mean, coal and steel in Britain then were extremely important industries, and certainly there was no conceivable way in which Britain would have allowed them to go and be controlled by a common authority because, as you probably know, the key factor in the European Coal and Steel Community was that it was run by a high authority which was a European authority which had very strong powers to control those industries, the pricing, the marketing, the development, and Britain would never have allowed that to happen.

Charles de Gaulle [archival]: [Speaking in French]

Journalist [archival]: A community with Britain and her partners would, according to De Gaulle, be a community dominated by America. Whatever else it would be, it would not be a community led by France.

Annabelle Quince: By the 1960s, Britain had changed its mind. Dr Andrew Mullen is a lecturer in politics at Northumberland University and the author of The British left: For and Against Europe?

Andrew Mullen: By the 1960s I think Britain was experiencing economic problems, business people were looking across the water into continental Europe and seeing that the economies of the six founding members of the European Economic Community were doing much better than Britain. I think business was also concerned that they were potentially missing out on a common market there that was a bigger market than what was available in Britain in terms of them being able to sell their goods and services. So economically the reality started to change, the British economy started to be more oriented towards continental Europe, although of course Commonwealth trade was still important, but I think the trend was evident as early as the 1960s.

And then politically I think there was a case of pressure being brought to bear on British governments by the United States. One of the things that the United States were concerned about…and again, we can find evidence of this in the declassified records, the State Department records, for example, that the United States were very concerned that Europe under French and German leadership would become an autarchic bloc, so it would become a protectionist entity. And that of course was very threatening to American business that wanted open access to European markets. And so they wanted Britain to join as almost a Trojan horse.

You can look at the declassified British records, records that were declassified after 30 years, and again, the foreign office mandarins, the civil servants talk in that language about how we should try make sure that Britain is not seen as being a Trojan horse for US interests in Europe. But that is indeed one of the reasons why De Gaulle vetoed Britain's application in 1961 and again in 1967. He didn't think that Britain was sufficiently committed to the European project, and that's why he vetoed our applications in those years.

Journalist [archival]: As the season of British party political conferences gets underway, the argument grows again as to whether we should or should not join the common market.

Annabelle Quince: In 1973, Britain's Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath made a third application and this time it was accepted. Once in the club, Britain was required to follow all the EEC policies, including their agricultural and fisheries policies.

Christopher Booker: The most interesting and revealing episodes when Britain decided to join in 1970 was we had the largest fishing industry in Europe, we had the richest fishing waters in the world by an accident of geography around Britain, and there was absolutely nothing in the original treaty that set up the common market about fisheries.

But what the French in particular saw was that this was a chance to insert an entirely new idea into the European construction, as they call it, which was to seize all the fishing waters around Europe as a 'common European resource', was the phrase. So they did this in a way that was absolutely devastating to the British fishing industry, and in effect what we were doing was handing over 80% of the fish in European waters which were in British waters, we were handing them over to Brussels. I mean, our fishing industry is almost non-existent now.

The other common policy which was talked about at that time was the common agricultural policy which unites all European farming policy under…makes it all one huge great entity, all directed from Brussels. At that time we had the most efficient farming industry in Europe, whereas the French and Germans had much larger farming industries which were very much less efficient. So the net effect of our joining the common agricultural policy was that we were shovelling huge quantities of subsidies into the pockets of French and German farmers, British taxpayers were.

Catherine Hoskyns: Well, I think the British don't like being controlled by someone else. In fact actually the British diplomats and British technical experts are very good at negotiating and have a lot of influence. I think the British, once they were members, did play a considerable role. The agricultural policy has always been a bit of a bugbear because Britain doesn't have a large agricultural sector and it was already by then being quite heavily subsidised and dealt with on a national basis. So coming into the European community which had this big agriculture…I mean, 70% of expenditure was on agriculture initially, it's gone down to 40% now, but it was heavily subsidised through the European budget, and that was really initially to satisfy the French because it was clear that Germany was going to benefit industrially, so the balance was that Germany would get the industrial market and the French would have subsidised agriculture. But you also have to remember that food and hunger had been a huge factor during the war. Many of the European countries were desperately short of food, and so the idea of having a secure regional supply was very important and very telling. Now, the British never bought into that. The Irish actually have benefited a lot from the common agricultural policy, but the British never bought into that.

Oliver Daddow: The key problems for Britain have always been joining late and then having to adapt to community structures which weren't set up in effect to benefit Britain, they were set up to benefit…in a sense it was a compromise between German industrial might and French farmers, if you want to put it bluntly.

Annabelle Quince: Dr Oliver Daddow is a reader in international politics at the University of Leicester.

Oliver Daddow: Britain had to adapt to rulemaking, rule procedures and economic rules and regulations which didn't necessarily suit the British economy, although trade patterns from the UK to Europe had been shifting away from Commonwealth countries to the EEC over the previous 10, 15 years. So the economic impact actually is quite tricky just to say whether it was down to the EEC or not, but what happened to the British economy in the early 1970s was it actually suffered from a lot of industrial tensions, economic downturns, and of course these were caused by global patterns, things like the OPEC price rises in '74 and then again later in '78. Well, these would have had an impact on the UK economy regardless of membership of the EEC and it hit EEC states as well.

So in terms of what happened to the British economy, the British economy didn't benefit massively, although it did benefit from more easy access to imports and exports on the continent, which it wouldn't have had otherwise. So the British people, they'd never really experienced a boom to associate with the idea of Europe that their counterparts in France, Germany, Belgium and so on had experienced, so the British have never had that inbuilt, deep empathy for the European project, partly because they've never really benefited directly economically from it or they don't seem to benefit directly from it in the same sort of way.

Annabelle Quince: This is Rear Vision on RN and via the web. I'm Annabelle Quince and today we're tracing the relationship between Britain and the European Union.

In 1974 the British Labour Party, who had initially been sceptical about joining Europe, gained office. They had pledged to renegotiate the terms of Britain's admission into the EEC, and then to consult the people in a referendum.

Harold Wilson [archival]: Given a yes vote, it will be the day on which the British people at last give what they have not yet given; their consent to Europe.

Journalist [archival]: That was the voice of Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson, making his final emotional plea to Britain's voters to stay in the common market.

Andrew Mullen: The headline public opinion polls at the time suggested that there was a majority of people who did not support Britain having gone in and actually favoured Britain coming out of Europe, and yet when it actually came to the 1975 referendum, people voted to stay in by a two-thirds majority. It begs the question, well, why did that happen? There are two interesting things. One, in 1975 we saw another very, very concerted propaganda campaign. Most of the business community in Britain at that time was in favour of a yes vote, staying in. The trade union movement was split. But most of the media were in favour of…they all called for a yes vote. So again, the British establishment sort of rallied behind Britain staying in.

What's also interesting about this is the parallels with today, because although the headline figures suggested that most people were opposed to Europe, once the psephologists actually dug down and deconstructed those polls and asked different questions, what they found was that although people were opposed to staying in Europe, when asked the question—if we renegotiated our terms of entry such that they were improved, would you vote yes—a sizeable proportion of those said yes, okay. So in effect therefore the opposition was quite superficial, it was a malleable, it was open to change, and indeed that is indeed what happened.

Journalist [archival]: As we have already heard, the people of Britain have expressed their will in their first ever national referendum, a resounding two-to-one vote for staying in Europe.

Andrew Mullen: And the parallels with today are quite stark because it looks as though that is indeed what David Cameron's strategy is. If the Conservatives win the general election in 2015 and we get the referendum in 2017, it's almost like a complete rerun of 1975, however with some important differences.

Annabelle Quince: One of the major issues the British have with the European Union is the way policies and decisions are made.

Christopher Booker: What we are looking at here is a system of government like none that the world has seen before, and the way that government has been built up and has increased its powers has basically been through a series of treaties, and we've had nine of them so far. Each time there is a treaty what essentially happens is that they have a thing called an intergovernmental conference where they all sit around for anything up to two years, and they negotiate between them, the countries, what are the next tranche of powers that will be handed over from national government to the supranational government in Brussels.

There was a famous treaty of Maastricht in 1992, and that was the one where it was decided that Europe should have a single currency, the euro. So that is the way in which the powers are handed over, through these intergovernmental conferences leading to a treaty. What then happens is that once Brussels has got a power or competence as they are called, over a particular area of policy such as the environment or agriculture or fisheries, then the proposals for legislation are all conceived by this thing called the European Commission sitting in Brussels, which is often presented as if it's just a civil service. It isn't, it's far more important than a civil service.

It was always intended right from the start that the European Commission sitting in Brussels should be the driving force for all the legislation, and only the Commission can propose legislation. So in other words, it comes up with the idea of the next lot of laws that need to be made, what we call directives and regulations. And then they are discussed by political ministers from all the different countries. By the time the ministers get to look at them the process is already well towards the law becoming the law. So there is absolutely no control by national parliaments who no longer have any say in the matter because they've handed over the power to do this particular bit of lawmaking to Brussels.

There is a sort of fig leaf of democratic control in the fact that elected politicians then go to Brussels to say whether they agree with it or not, but 99.9% of the time they do agree because it's all been stitched up behind the scenes by civil servants over a period of probably two or three or four years. So in other words, that is how the system works. They have created something else as part of the whole package. In order to give the idea that there is still some democratic control, although it's complete make-believe, they have created this thing called the European Parliament.

So laws more and more are proposed by the Commission in Brussels and they then have to be agreed with the European Parliament, which sits partly in Brussels and partly in Strasbourg and is a complete joke. The idea is that the European Parliament is not a proper democratic control on the government because it's part of the government. So unlike America where you've got all the different bits of…you've got the Congress and you've got the President and you've got the Supreme Court in America, they are all balancing each other out and to a certain extent can control each other, in Europe all the institutions—the Parliament and the European Commission—they are all on the same side. All they are really concerned with is trying to increase the powers of this new supranational government.

Catherine Hoskyns: That has been a real problem, so I would say it was a bureaucracy rather than a democracy. And the European Commission, which is the bureaucratic element, has always had a lot of power. As you know, there is a European Parliament, and in the '70s you had direct elections to the European Parliament, but it was really too late by then, and people, certainly in Britain, don't take the European Parliament seriously.

The European Parliament does actually have more power now and does have to approve and debate most of the legislation that is adopted, but it's not…certainly in Britain it's not well regarded and it isn't transparent, partly because the media and the political system doesn't want it to be transparent. Countries want to be able to say what they've done and what they think, they don't want there to be a sort of common European opinion about what's happened. That is the democratic deficit, as it's called, and I think it is very serious.

Margaret Thatcher [archival]: This evening I want to set out some guiding principles for the future. My first guiding principle is this; willing and active cooperation between independent sovereign states is the best way to build a successful European community. To try to suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the centre of a European conglomerate would be highly damaging and would jeopardise the objectives we seek to achieve.

Christopher Booker: By far the most interesting political figure in Britain in the context of the way we've been sucked into, absorbed into this European thing, is Mrs Thatcher, because back in the early '70s she was completely persuaded that it was a good idea. So stage one is Mrs Thatcher is a very keen European. Stage two, she starts to see, when she becomes Prime Minister and actually goes to all these meetings in Brussels that it's not quite as she thought it was.

During the 1980s she could see that the whole thing was being moved very rapidly towards a much further state of political and economic union. They were beginning to talk about the single currency, and at that point she started to flip. And she made a famous speech in 1988 in a place called Bruges in Belgium where she said, look, Europe is going in completely the wrong direction, it's time we brought it back to something more sensible and less bureaucratic and something that preserved the rights of nation states still to govern themselves.

This put her on a collision course with the people who were in Brussels who were driving the thing forward towards much greater union. And over the next two years she had a whole series of battles. There's a famous occasion where she stood up in the House of Commons and she said what there was being proposed, and she said, 'My answer to this is no, no, no.'

Oliver Daddow: If you look historically since membership, whilst the British in some senses have been quite keen to downplay the politics, in actual fact several British prime ministers have really helped promote the cause of political unity, whether they meant to or not, but you suspect that they did. The two obvious ones are Margaret Thatcher, with a very forthright and prominent exponent of a single European market in the mid-1980s, and again, while that's an economic enterprise of course the political overtones to have a single market that works, the argument is always that you need political structures to help regulate differences across labour market structures and so on. So the single European market itself, if you are a politician signing those kinds of acts you would think, you would hope that you would have the awareness to think, my word, if I'm signing the economic agreement, the politics has to follow, by definition that's what happens in the modern world. So there's that example.

But if you think more recently, at the end of the Cold War Margaret Thatcher and then John Major were big proponents of enlargement of the EEC into the EU, and then Tony Blair as well, they've been big proponents of expanding the zone of peace that the EU represents, partly for security regions. So you have the British playing a very prominent role in enlargement, from six member states in 1957 now to 27 member states. So these are pretty legendary moves in integration, and they've all been brought about with the help certainly not only of Britain but with a leading role played by Britain which sometimes belies its rhetoric about the economic nature of this club, it's a political club and the British have always recognised that, and I think it's slightly odd that some people seem to have either overlooked or forgotten it. It's never been hidden that it's a political club and Britain does political things in it for its own interest.

Christopher Booker: What Cameron says and what pretty well everyone says is we want to continue trading with the European Union, and in order to do that we have a thing called the single market, and we want to be part of the single market so that they can sell things to us and we can sell things to them. However, there are other countries which are part of the single market which are not in the European Union, and Norway and Switzerland happen to be two of the most obvious who happened to be also the richest countries in Europe per capita, and they do more trade with the European Union than Britain in many ways. They are not members of the European Union, and there are arrangements which we could enter into.

We could join a thing called the European Free Trade Area, which is what Norway belongs to, or we could have separate deals with the EU, as Switzerland does, and we could continue having all the access that Cameron and people say they want. But what we would be doing if we left the European Union, we'd have to have a genuine negotiation of a new relationship that involved us staying in the trading bit of the European Union without all the political stuff on top. And it's the political stuff which is the real problem.

Oliver Daddow: A country like Norway which is outside of the EU still trades on terms which are set within the EU itself, so they are still accepting rules and regulations which come from the European Commission in tandem with the various other organs of EU governance, but they have no say in how those rules and regulations are made or decided upon. So a country like Britain, to suggest that it would be better off outside the EU, it rather suggests a lot of things which you couldn't really see happening.

Catherine Hoskyns: We are now a regional power. It's a far stronger regional entity than any other region has, and we should make use of that. But I think there are things that need reforming and that Britain should play its part in that. And we have tremendous resources, as I said, of technical and diplomatic expertise which, if we put into the European arena without this kind of always looking back to our independent past, we can have a huge influence, we have had a huge influence. And I think it's very beneficial. If you talk to young people they love the fact they can travel all over Europe and they can work, they have the right to seek work in any European country, they absolutely love that, and they take it for granted. So I think for Britain it's a good antidote to these lingering ideas of the imperial past.

Andrew Mullen: If indeed the Conservatives win in 2015 and we do get a referendum in 2017, in some senses it will actually be a rerun of 1975. You know, the polls that I noticed just a few weeks ago suggested that if a referendum was held now, a majority of people would vote to leave. However, again, when the psephologists asked them different questions and say—if the government has renegotiated the terms and repatriated some powers and then recommended that Britain should stay in, how then do you feel about it—and again there is a significant number of people who are superficial, as it were, in their Euro-scepticism and would actually be persuaded by that and would actually vote to stay in.

What's different however about 1975 is that whereas the business community and the media in 1975 were unified in saying that Britain should stay in, now certainly the right-wing newspapers and significant sections of the business community, particularly those transnational corporations that do business outside of Europe as well as within it, you would see much more of a campaign for coming out which we didn't really see in 1975. So I think although the pro-Europeans are probably secretly quite confident that they could carry the day and that actually we would repatriate some powers and Britain would stay in, I think they would have a more difficult job than they actually had in 1975. But I think they are probably confident that they can still win the day.

Annabelle Quince: Andrew Mullen, author of The British Left: For and Against Europe? Our other guests: Catherine Hoskyns, professor emeritus at Coventry University; Dr Oliver Daddow, reader in international politics at the University of Leicester; and Sunday Telegraph columnist and author Christopher Booker.

Today's sound engineer is Jennifer Parsonage. I'm Annabelle Quince, and this is Rear Vision on RN.

Guests

Christopher Booker

Columnist with the Sunday Telegraph in the United Kingdom

Catherine Hoskyns

Professor Emeritus at Coventry University in gender studies and European politics.